Then he understands the mystery of language, which is articulate sound, sound magnetized in every vocal apparatus by every human being, by every human faculty, by the thought that God had revealed to his sleep.
Then an inspired analysis enables him to decompose the great synthesis that rests in all human languages.
Then he finds in the roots of words the permanent expression of revelation and spontaneity; in grammatical form the varied expression of human reason, the issue of divine reason; in trope and rhythm the expression of the imagination in relation to the spectacle of the earth and the heavens, with nature and beings; in all that marvelous ensemble, the symbol, the inspiration, the music, the poetry, the prophetic faculty exercising itself on the past and the future, a spontaneous, free, progressive psychology of humanity.
IV
Strophe
The mission of the Hebrew people is revealed to Hebal. He recognizes the patriarchs, depositories of the ancient promise.
With Moses he visits the sanctuaries of Egypt, and with him, he extracts his people from the house of servitude to lead them through the desert to the promised land.
The Ark of the Covenant, the stations in the desert, the wandering tribes, the troubles, the battles, the returns to idolatry, everything is symbolic. It is the type and image of the initiation of the human species.
Hebal had recognized Abraham, the pontiff king, that priest of Salem, that king of justice, Melchisedech, of whom the generation before and after have remained unknown, and who was dressed in eternal sacerdocy.
He sight had been dazzled on Sinai.
He had heard Isaac, Ezekiel and Jeremiah.
Daniel had recounted the potential events that occur in heaven before passing into action on earth.
And the people had wearied of the government of God, and Samuel had decreed all the prerogatives of royalty. Kings had sat, first on the throne of Judea, then on the thrones of Israel and Judea; and all the laws that rule dynasties and people had been known.
How beautiful were the days of Esdra and Nehemiah!
How beautiful were the days when the Jews, raising the walls of Jerusalem, held a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other, as they had once celebrated the Passover without setting down the traveler’s staff.
And the glorious family of Maccabees excited an immense admiration.
And the time of the accomplishment of the promise approached; and the promise resounded increasingly in the world; and the promise took on several diverse forms among the nations.
One glance sufficed to embrace seventy times seven years.
And around these great events, which are the axle of the marvelous wheel of human destiny, grate occasional distant rumors: they are empires that rise and fall; they are obscure and dazzling dynasties that perish enveloped in the same darkness; they are peoples who disappear as if they had never existed. How many times, in different places, have terrible anathemas been pronounced, fatal words written by an inflexible hand on the walls of the banqueting hall where a pitiless dominator is rejoicing! But Egypt, the empire founded by Nimrod, Phoenicia, Tyre and Sidon, the memories of which remain solely in the prophecies that condemned great metropolises to perish! Where are Sesostris and Alexander? Has the eye time to follow a flash of lightning through the cloud? And yet, something remains of Alexander: he transported the Orient into Egypt. And yet, something remains of Egypt: an immense realization of death, all human science becoming a vast mute hieroglyph.
Antistrophe
The Pelasges have marked the first transition of the Orient to the Occident; the Hellenes have created fantasy. The heroic centuries are but a memory.
Moses, Orpheus and Buddha have divided the empire of human intelligence between themselves.
The expedition of the Argonauts, the war of the Epigones and the ruin of Troy form a poetic beacon on the far historical horizon, where one still perceives the personifications of races and the migrations that will be illustrious Greece.
Seven cities have disputed the birth of Homer, but Hebal has searched in vain for the marvelous old man.
Those songs which acquire a name, which put on a face, which become a poet, show Hebal how each people strives to make it epic, how each race strives to make its own, how all these successive epics must end up producing the general epic of the human race, how the thought of that definitive epic, one in its magnificent diversity, is nothing other than the very thought of the universal religion.
The gigantic conceptions of the Orient have come to be founded in Greek anthropomorphism.
The heroic races have disappeared from the soil that they fashioned with their strong hands, and they have let monuments that will cause subsequent ages to say: how powerful were those who preceded us on the earth!
Hebal’s attention is scarcely attracted to the murmurs in the public square of Athens. It is entirely focused on the struggle between the Dorian and Ionian principles that is manifest in the Peloponnesian war; he sees therein the antagonism between destiny and the human will; if Sparta tries in vain to stereotype heroic civilization, it is also in vain that Athens exaggerates human emancipation.
But although the death of three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae was futile for Greece, it is still useful to the world, for noble actions are the solace of minds.
Socrates drinks the hemlock; the tearful genius of Greece turns away, knowing that a people that kills its prophets is doomed.
The tragic muse and the comic muse have caused their accents to resound. The lyric muse can no longer excite masculine courage. Eloquence has lost its power; the reign of the sophists has begun.
The mysteries of Eleusis are staged.
The sibyl of Delphi is no longer the expression of national amphictyony.
The Greeks are no more now than the soldiers of Philip and Alexander; and Greece will end up as a Roman province.
Aristotle and Plato hasten to bequeath to the future, one the world of fact and science, the other the world of ideas and art.
Such is the brilliant episode of Greece.
The movement of Greece was aborted; Hebal knew why; it is because human will, on its own, is inadequate to achieve its initiation.
Nevertheless, Greece has saved the progressive and plebeian principle of which it was the custodian.
The democrat of Athens, who have committed so many errors in Sicily, on the shores of Great Greece, who were so stupid and improvident, who let Socrates drink the hemlock, who lulled themselves with the harmonious satires of Aristophanes, were nevertheless well worthy of the Occident. They vanquished the great king at Salamis. The victory of Salamis still reigns over the world.
That is not all; they created art, and art is the noble crown of plebeian genius.
Epode
All the empires of the Orient are static.
The progressive destinies of the Occident date from the era of the Olympiads, but their development is considerably anterior.
The events are distinct; nevertheless, they appear together before thought, which embraces them all simultaneously.
Thus Hebal sees at the same time a domination born that will succeed all others, the one that will one day give birth to the modern world.
Old Evander and blind Thamyris, amid the hill of future Rome, talk about an unknown future.
A cloud that passes over the Pelasges and the Sicules prevents their perception.
Here again Hebal was astonished to see that the beginning of human affairs is never the beginning of human destinies, and that history is always obliged to sink into the horizon of myth.
V
Strophe
Where, then, is the cradle of the Roman people? Is it from the lair of a she-wolf or a nest of brigands that the people will emerge who will subjugate the world? And will not the world one day be the Roman world? A first king, who is a fratricide, founds the eternal city, establishes marriage by abduction—and no one knows how Romulus died, because he vanished in a storm.
A second king pr
ovides a religion, but science searches in vain for the rites of the religion provided by Numa. Hebal, however, sees the ruminal fig-tree, the goat’s marsh, and the wood and spring of Egeria. He sees the field where the three brothers of Rome battled the three brothers of Alba.
Another king plants in Roman soil the legal branch that will become the great plebeian tree.
Hebal turns his gaze to the rascal path—and shields fall from the sky! And the Tarquins! And Lake Regilla! And Horatius Cocles! And Porsena! And Mutius Scevola! And Junius Brutus! And Lucretius! And Tarquin dying in exile!
Hebal turns his gaze again, but Brutus does not turn his own. And each king is a personification of a social entity; and these marvelous personifications complete the powerful number seven, which is a cosmogonic and planetary number. All these symbolic royalties succeed one another in a dubious twilight, which is no longer night but not yet day. And every origin goes back to exposed children and fratricides: a primitive emblem of the violence of the social condition. Ordeal! Initiation!
And the law of the Twelve Tables, the august debris of an anterior law! It governed before being; it will govern after having been.
And the new people is obliged to battle incessantly to conquer its own territory.
And in the midst of the various events of that continuous war, three fats stand out like three luminous points. They are the plebeian secessions. The first, in the Aventine, produces conscience; the second, on the Crustumerian Mount, produced marriage; the third produces dignity. Thus the plebeian is the human making itself. And Hebal follows all the phases of that antagonism of the stationary principle and the progressive principle, an antagonism that it a law of the fallen and rehabilitated human species, which is the hidden spring of Roman history, and of all history.
Antistrophe
Rome and Carthage dispute the empire of the world.
Hannibal and Scipio acquire immortal glory.
The Gauls believe that they have stifled the Roman giant, but it has too great a destiny to accomplish.
The Gracchi show their imposing and noble face, bright with the flame of Prometheus, which will consume them. And Marius and Sulla, and Caesar and Pompey share out the bloody shreds; civil war—a single civil war—covers the world. Pharsalia and Actium decide the possession of the world.
And the tribunal, born obscurely of the first plebeian secession, after having grown in discord and in war, is personified, and becomes an emperor. And Octavian, in the name of Augustus, reins without division. The imperial purple hides his crimes; all the perfumes of an imitative poetry burn at his feet. Horace and Virgil charm the world for a long time.
Epode
The world is at peace. Peoples rest in a universal truce, which does not last long. The oracles of the Romans fall silent. The sibyls, having become foreign to an old world that will perish, can no longer do anything but promise nations the Desideratum; the nations are expectant.
And various voices are heard.
“I shall summon, the Orient, which is my servant.”
“Where is the Desideratum of the eternal hills? Let him appear?”
“Heavens! Pour your dew from on high, and let the clouds weep Justice!”
“How beautiful are the feet of the one who brings the great redemption!”
And the Etruscans told the Romans that the Peacemaker would be born of a virgin.
A woman would encompass a man, and that woman would be the woman, and that man would be the man.
And that man would have the name Emanuel, God with is.
And the sibyls speak like Isaiah and David.
The prophets that bring word of the Mediator form but a single word, and that word expresses all of human destiny throughout the extent of time, time posed upon eternity, and that word, again, which is simultaneously cosmogonic and apocalyptic, which unites the marvel of heaven, earth and the universe with the marvels of the one and identical humanity, escapes from all the depths of Creation.
Hebal knew the perpetual and endless sacrifice, which is a peaceful sacrifice, not bloody.
Nevertheless, there would be flesh and blood at the moment of the manifestation of the sacrifice for the human race, fallen and regenerated.
And a great frisson ran through all of Hebal’s organs, and the frisson was that of all Creation gripped by a dolorous sympathy for the future that will be the present.
VI
Strophe
And the volitional faculty of humans, concentrated in a weak woman, who is purity itself, receives the spirit of God; the Creator identifies with his creature; the Redemption promised to human beings at the very moment of their fall is born of a virgin. He has been conceived without the collaboration of a man, and he is called the Son of Man. Bethlehem, an obscure but predicted place, is the royal city. A stable is the palace of the Child’s promised to the nations. Oriental Magi and poor shepherds surround his cradle. Angels bring him the adoration of the heavens.
Hebal is sunk deep in a divine ecstasy. His prayer is of love. The universal mystery does not astonish him because it has been given to him to penetrate the ontological principle of human being, because he knows what humankind is in the harmony of worlds, because all the traditions spread over the surface of the earth cause him to hear a unanimous cry of assent, because contact with the chain of human destinies has stirred within him all the power of conviction, and because he has been inundated by the glory of the heavens.
The divine Child grows up in wisdom and all kinds of perfection. His mother searches for him, and finds him among the doctors.
Christ is baptized in the waters of the Jordan by the holy precursor, and a voice from heaven proclaims him the Son of God.
The spirit of temptation shows him, from the tower of the temple, the kingdoms of the earth, and he disdains the kingdoms of the earth. Hebal also feels pity for the splendors of the dust, for he has just glimpsed the splendors of heaven.
The spirit of temptation transports into the desert the one who will animate the desert, and the spirit of temptation flees the Desideratum of the nations.
The Savior cures the sick, resuscitates the dead, converts the fishermen, calms the tempests.
And the crowd follows in the Savior’s footsteps.
And his immense forbearance confounds the accusers of the adulterous woman.
And he promises the Samarian that spring of fresh water that staunches thirst eternally. The time comes, and has already come, when people will no longer worship here or there, but in mind and in truth.
And he is with Martha and Mary, and with the sister of Lazarus.
And he allows a woman to wash his feet with perfumes.
And he takes his pleasure with the children of humankind, bearing their burdens, loving them until death. He weeps with them; with them he eats the bread that is their customary nourishment; with them he drinks the wine that is their joy and their strength.
And he does not disdain the publicans; and every soul is dear to him.
And he explains to Nicodemus the great mystery of rebirth in spirit, the mystery of the new humankind, but Nicodemus cannot understand it yet.
The Messiah is transfigured on the Tabor; the glare of his garments dazzles Hebal’s eyes.
Here he is entering Jerusalem in triumph; the mount of the triumphant pacifier is a donkey. And he weeps in Jerusalem, for the day has come.
And he celebrates the last Passover with his disciples. He institutes the Last Supper by pronouncing the word that, throughout the ages, will make of his body and blood a perpetual and endless sacrifice.
Antistrophe
And Hebal remembers the mystic lamb immolated at the commencement of the world; and he understands that the mystery of regeneration is an ever-present cosmogonic mystery.
And he remembers too that bread and wine are very powerful emblems among all peoples. And he tells himself that the word Eucharist expresses grace and love.
And while Christ institutes the universal religious marriage, he lean
s on the shoulder of his beloved disciple. And the Savior of humankind sympathizes with the one who will betray him.
Sweat and blood run over his face in the Garden of Olives, because he is appropriating all pain and all sin to himself.
He keeps vigil and he prays, and his disciples succumb to sleep, for fatigue overwhelms the children of humankind.
Soldiers come to arrest him, and the prince of the apostles tries to defend his Master, but the Master orders him to sheath his sword.
And the price of the treason has been thirty deniers. And the one who has received the price of the treason does not want to keep them, and the priests buy the potter’s field with them—and an ancient prophecy is fulfilled.
And the prince of the apostles denies his Master three times.
Now the prince of the apostles was a poor fisherman.
And the Son of the Virgin appears before the human judge.
And he is crowned with thorns. A reed scepter is placed in his hands. A scarlet cloak covers his bruised shoulders. He is delivered to outrages and mockery. And it is said to him: Behold the man.
And a murderer is preferred to him.
And an entire people demands his blood, and an entire people cries out, to call upon itself and its children the blood of the innocent.
And he walks to Calvary bearing his cross, and tells the women who follow him not to weep for him.
And only one man helps him to bear his cross, who is not one of his disciples.
And a woman wipes the bloody sweat from his beautiful face.
And he is nailed to the tree of opprobrium, with this inscription: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.
And he is placed between two malefactors.
Investigations of the Future Page 29
